Letter: Carbon emissions cut a futile gesture
Some of the measures are designed to conserve fuels, but others, intended to curtail greenhouse gases, are quite unnecessary, requiring new, expensive equipment and staff to "police". These include stricter maintenance of speed limits, car sharing and parking levies at workplaces. Are universal thermal insulation subsidies or forestry planting cost-effective?
Since CO2 output from the UK, at 2 per cent of the world's total, with 0.2 per cent from Scotland, is negligible, the ambitious targets for reduction are a futile gesture, which can only hamper our recovery from massive debt, for no useful benefit to the world, let alone Scotland. The claims of enhancement of our economic prospects from reducing CO2 output are unconvincing. Other, useful, Scottish Government expenditures will suffer from poaching of their budgets.
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Hide AdIt is time the Scottish Government came clean about the non-impact of our greenhouse gases in the real world, admitting that we need not undertake "world-beating" reductions, always just a foolish, empty gesture.
The plan should be trimmed drastically, to retain only means of conservation of fuels. Our nation is in such financial and industrial trouble that only such fuel economies are now useful and justified.
The Climate Change Acts (2008 and 2009) should be repealed, as it is almost completely useless and unaffordable anyway. Look after the fossil fuels and carbon and the pounds will look after themselves.
Charles Wardrop, Perth